Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
May 2011
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011aas...21831302w&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #218, #313.02; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 43, 2011
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
Even at the inner edge of the Kuiper Belt, objects are too cold for WISE to see their thermal emission. Thus WISE is limited to reflected Sunlight, and this is brighter in the optical than at 3.4 microns. Hence WISE is only efficient for finding gas giants in the Oort cloud, with mass greater than Jupiter, whose internal heat produces a large flux at 4.6 microns. For Jupiter itself, DIRBE measured 6 kJy at 4.9 microns. Since the W2 band is more centered on the peak of the spectrum, WISE could see this at a distance 10000 times greater than the actual distance of Jupiter, or nearly one light-year. But if Jupiter were this far from the Sun, its bolometric flux would go down by nearly a factor of two, and the W2 flux would go down by a larger but model dependent factor. Thus WISE should be able to barely pick up the 1 Jupiter mass object at a distance of 30,000 AU that is at one corner of the Matese and Whitmire parameter space. But such an object would only be one source among thousands of band 2 only sources at the 5 sigma limit. Finding this needle in a haystack will require a reprocessing and co-addition of the post-cryogen data collected by WISE, an effort which is currently not funded by NASA.
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